Coronavirus mistakes are sickening
Scientific experts and politicians, including the president, said they understood the virus, and that it was controllable. They were wrong.
They said they knew how to deal with patients who contracted the deadly disease. Nope.
And they claimed that since their containment protocols were adequate, the risk to Americans was low. Strike three.
God must have been looking favorably upon America, because in spite of extraordinary incompetence exhibited by President Obama and the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) during the Ebola crisis, the United States didn’t suffer a mass outbreak. But Divine Intervention simply cannot remain our default plan for virus management.
Lessons learned during Ebola should have generated far better protocols for the next outbreak, but based on America’s response thus far to the coronavirus, that isn’t the case.
Here is a report card of how things have been handled:
Learning from the past: Grade D.
Consider the mind-boggling mistakes that we made with Ebola. Despite knowing that it was coming to America, the CDC was inexcusably unprepared. The first two Americans treated were producing 40 bags of highly contagious medical waste daily. The CDC’s response? It sent workers to Home Depot to buy 32-gallon trash cans. No joke. It also had no plan for disposal, so, for over a week, mounds of Ebola-ridden waste sat at the hospital. Even worse, medical workers returning from the Ebola hot zone were not quarantined. The most infamous case was when nurse Kaci Hickox registered a fever at Newark airport. Gov. Chris Christie placed her under the state’s mandatory quarantine. But she didn’t like it and threatened to sue, so Christie released her into America’s most densely populated region. The lesson was that “mandatory” quarantines aren’t effective if we don’t enforce the “mandatory” part.
So with that in mind, and after realizing how contagious coronavirus was, why did the government take so long to establish travel restrictions with China and enact quarantines? Compounding matters were the slew of contradictory messages about quarantines: First they weren’t going to be required, then it was suggested that people coming from China “self-isolate” for 14 days — a ridiculous proposition that people were certain to ignore.
Donald Trump: C-minus. And that’s being kind. Here’s a guy who tweets nonstop about anything and everything, but when a global epidemic presented itself, he went silent (and yet roundly criticized President Obama for his handling of the Ebola crisis). Only after weeks of news reports by the not-so-fake media did the president begin to act.
But he was weeks behind the private sector, where many companies had seen the writing on the wall and proactively curtailed operations in China. So why the delay by Mr. Trump? Incompetent advisers and preoccupation with impeachment were certainly factors. But the main reason for the president’s intransigence is that he chose politics over people, ceding to Chinese pressure to curtail criticism of how China handled the outbreak. Mr. Trump had recently earned a victory in trade negotiations, but wanted an even more far-reaching win heading into the election.
Chinese Response: F-minus. The litany of Chinese failures just keeps getting longer. They deliberately withheld information about coronavirus for weeks, thereby allowing it to become uncontainable; weren’t truthful about how many people have been infected and killed — with some experts believing the real number is magnitudes higher; refused to shut down the exotic animal markets where coronavirus likely originated, despite their decades-old promise to do so; arrested doctors who tried to warn the world; censored viewpoints contrary to the “official” position; and, some media reports claim, are burning bodies in crematoriums to hide the extent of the epidemic.
Political Correctness: B. It’s obviously not right to assume everyone of Oriental ethnicity has coronavirus, but invoking political correctness to fight what the offended class deems “anti-Chinese bias” is downright dangerous. In some areas with heavy Chinese populations, parents are asking that students of families who have returned from China over the past two weeks be barred from school during the virus incubation period. That’s a legitimate request, and school boards and mayors should not be jumping on the PC bandwagon by labeling such people racist and xenophobic.